More than anything, it is always the death of someone or the end of an event that makes you stand still and listen to your own solitary insignificance.

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It somewhat saddens me - the fact that I cannot even make an effort to wake up early in the morning to jog. I, instead, go to the gym now to make up for lost days. Thirty minutes on the treadmill, for me, does not constitute a real run. You miss out on a lot of things- the first kiss of fresh air, sounds of people waking up, the day slowly unraveling.

We still have the best mornings. Upon waking up, everything seems to have that old, blurred quality, as if you were stuck wallowing in an old photograph. And in the photograph, whispered promises of better things - an untangled life, a greater good, a future happiness. This is probably why a lot of Filipinos are incurable optimists. (This is not meant to be taken as a compliment)

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My friend A, who works for a monthly, was asked by her boss to do a write-up on a boy, all of 12 years old, who is an advanced chess player, a talented instrumentalist, and a wunderkind of sorts. This boy has ADD. But A (who became a blood sister of mine during our days at the Journalism Department at UP) is supposed to write about how normal this boy is when really, there's nothing usual about him.

So I ask her, what are his interests, what are the games that he likes to play?

She tells me he has no friends.

Okay, I ask, favorite breakfast? Crispy meteorites? Salty Mars men?

Nothing that special. Sausages, I think.

Oh okay, that's normal enough.

It's hard enough to begin an article, she says, and now I'm stuck with an opening paragraph that
has the word sausage in it.

Sounds juicy, A.

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I do not appreciate my having memory lapses at this day and age. Especially in the business that I am currently in, I cannot afford to have misplaced adjectives and spilt infinitives.

Note to self: Resume reading the dictionary.

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Margaret Atwood on writing:

“I look back over what I’ve written and I know it’s wrong, not because of what I’ve set down, but because of what I’ve omitted. What isn’t there has a presence, like the absence of light.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.” – Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

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The perennial question: Which would you choose, what you want or what you need?

I think you choose this - the thing that you want - because it is something that you have not owned; a treat that you can’t have on a regular day like you would something as usual and expected as a toothbrush. A need is a given, a sum of laid out parts. You consider its consistency a weakness, something that you can do without. And you say, I’ll get it tomorrow or some other day or next year because you know that you only have to look sideways and there it is – on shelves, inserted in books, stuck in the limbo of your neglect and its love.

With something you want, there will always be that element of surprise, that strange perfection, an urgency that overwhelms. It is the grotesque apple, the calming hour, the sudden crisp smell of cinnamon when you close your eyes. It is devoid of banality because it is unknown and oblivious. It weaves itself in and out of your cup of regret. Tucked in your shirtpocket, drowned in your cigarette smoke, wrapped in your blind faith. In spite of all this, you reject its presence in your life because you are afraid of saying yes to weakness yes to probable events yes to upheaval.

Still you reach for it –this thing that you want- and keep it hidden from everyone else. You can’t let other people see you hanker after it, what with all the private hunger going on.

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At the gym, there is a trainer named Jayne. She looks so much like her. Or what I imagine her to look like. This infuriates me most nights but I refuse to be taken in by my recollections. But seeing Jayne here is like having her around, in the flesh. It makes her less of a myth, which frightens me. My imagination has gone amok. She is squished under the leg crunch machine or helplessly pinned down by one of the more muscular weightlifters, her eyes reduced to little black x’s. But I decide that I’m being too cruel and am doing Jayne an injustice. I am sure that she is a lot nicer and doesn’t lack the necessary characteristics to qualify as a human being. She smiles patiently at me when I can’t complete crunches. The smile hangs on her face like a dangerous ornament, a curved amulet.

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My former Journ classmates from UP and I are collaborating on a blog account that we’re planning to put up soon. The ideas that we have gathered so far are both stimulating and refreshing, to say the least. Most of my Journ batchmates have managed to pursue their/our craft (sniffle), so I’m sure they are better writers now than they were before.

I’m not going to mention the specifics yet since we haven’t sat down and discussed everything. Everyone involved wants to do things right, especially since this would ,again, involve writing for the public.

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It’s almost summer. Can’t wait to enroll in a workshop.

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Admittedly, I am not longer a Sexton fan. But there are really some poems of hers that still strike me numb.

Like this one:

For Johnny Pole On The Forgotten Beach
Anne Sexton


In his tenth July some instinct
taught him to arm the waiting wave,
a giant where its mouth hung open.
He rode on the lip that buoyed him there
and buckled him under. The beach was strung
with children paddling their ages in,
under the glare od noon chipping
its light out. He stood up, anonymous
and straight among them, between
their sand pails and nursery crafts.
The breakers cartwheeled in and over
to puddle their toes and test their perfect
skin. He was my brother, my small
Johnny brother, almost ten. We flopped
down upon a towel to grind the sand
under us and watched the Atlantic sea
move fire, like night sparklers;
and lost our weight in the festival
season. He dreamed, he said, to be
a man designed like a balanced wave...
how someday he would wait, giant
and straight.

Johnny, your dream moves summers
inside my mind.

He was tall and twenty that July,
but there was no balance to help;
only the shells came straight and even.
This was the first beach of assault;
the odor of death hung in the air
like rotting potatoes, the junkyard
of landing craft waited open and rusting.
The bodies were strung out as if they were
still reaching for each other, where they lay
to blacken, to burst through their perfect
skin. And Johnny Pole was one of them.
He gave in like a small wave, a sudden
hole in his belly and the years all gone
where the Pacific noon chipped its light out.
Like a bean bag, outflung, head loose
and anonymous, he lay. Did the sea move fire
for its battle season? Does he lie there
forever, where his rifle waits, giant
and straight?

I think you die again
and live again, Johnny, each summer that moves inside
my mind.